“No. I had to learn to take care of myself, which I did. I grew up fast. It took a couple of years to get back on my feet after my divorce. Then, I got my General Education Diploma and went to college and became a registered nurse.”

As Gwen spoke, Val couldn’t help but think how similar their lives have been. Both lost parents while still teenagers and they had to struggle to make something of themselves. She felt close to Gwen, perhaps a bond through similar hard life experiences. Val felt comfortable discussing more of her own story, telling Gwen things she never told anyone. “In order to make ends meet while I was in school, I worked nights and weekends as a waitress and still had a hard time. How did you do it, moneywise?”

“I worked full time at a shoe store in the local mall while going to school. There was no extra money to buy anything. Christ, I had to buy clothes at the thrift store. Nowadays, I don’t wear anything without a label…” Gwen laughed. “And never anything previously worn by someone else!”

Val shook her head and smiled as she reminisced: her own story was so much the same. “I still remember one particularly rough year when I went into a drug store and couldn’t spend the three dollars it cost to buy red fingernail polish. Do you know what was the first thing I bought when I starting making money as a dentist?”

“Designer nail polish?”

“No. I bought a Mercedes that was almost the same color red as that nail polish I wanted to buy.”

Gwen burst out laughing and lifted her glass in a toast.

“Keep laughing. I drive a ten-year-old Honda now! It is red.” Val laughed so hard that it hurt. She couldn’t believe how good it felt. She liked Gwen and wanted to know more about her and asked another question even though it was risky and might possibly bring up Oliver Solaris. She wished at that moment the Oliver Solaris issue didn’t exist. Unfortunately, it did. Val wondered how quickly this new friend would hate her if she knew the truth about her. “You said you were a registered nurse. How did you wind up as a death investigator?”

“Well, I worked as a nurse for a while, but was bored with it. A friend of mine pointed me in the direction of the morgue and death investigation. It was love at first sight and I knew immediately this is what I wanted to do.”

Val took a deep breath: that friend must have been Oliver. She waited for the obvious question now and thought to the excuse she had concocted as to how she knew this man, ready to use it.

“So, how did you get into death investigation? It’s a far cry from what you used to do,” Gwen asked.